Ninja Assassin Review

I'm known among my friends to be a bit of a ninja nut. For the last couple Halloweens I've been some kind of ninja, both from video games (dork). But ya know, I've not really seen too many ninja movies. Aside from a couple movies that feature ninjas, and Ninja Scroll, that's about it. No flat out ninja movies. So when I heard about Ninja Assassin, I was kinda pumped.

I remember seeing the first photographs and thinking it looked pretty cool, but then it sort of dropped under my radar. Suddenly, as a ninja movie should, it popped up out of nowhere, and I needed to see it.

This was a good thing, because I could go in with virtually no expectations (who would go in to a movie called Ninja Assassin with high expectations anyway?). This is also a good thing because the movie isn't. But it is moderately entertaining.

The opening scene does a great job of setting the tone for the film (maximum ninja carnage) but sadly, the rest of the movie never really owns up. My biggest complaint is that the ninjas in the movie never live up to the standards the movie sets for them. I mean, for the first half of it, the ninjas are a force of nature. Uncontrollable, unstoppable, un-not-badass. But later, they start getting owned by really lame things. A scared woman, a car, a fat guy, etc. These guys are trained to move in the shadows and we see (or not see, really, which is part of the magic) them do it, but then we see ninjas running out in moving traffic, totally visible, totally un-ninja. It would have been really awesome to see them sort of poofing back and forth from under cars to the top of the next car and so on, but nah, they're just trotting along and stupidly getting hit by cars as they go. These guys are NINJAS, and they can't hear cars about to smash into them. Now, I'm no ninja, but I'm pretty sure I can hear a car. I have enough self-awareness to know a car could hit me if I'm standing in the highway.

The story itself is pretty standard. Think an abridged version of Kill Bill, but with ninjas. Raizo is training to be a ninja, head-ninja (played awesomely by Sho Kosugi) kills Raizo's love-ninja, revenge/vengeance ensues. It's nothing fancy, and it doesn't need to be at all. But there's an element of international espionage going on, and it proves completely worthless. We get the idea that the ninjas have been hiring themselves out as assassins for various governments, and a few Europol agents start sticking their nose where it doesn't belong. It doesn't really get further than this. Considering how unnecessary the scenes were to the overall story, this isn't really a bad thing. Maslow, one of the agents (played by Ben Miles), "gets in the shit" with his superiors due to his investigations, but in the next scene he's leading an anti-ninja task force. To be honest I'm not really sure what was going on there. Taking all this out and making the movie a period film would have been a lot better.

But the story really isn't all that important in this kind of film. It's the action that really counts. The opening scene was really great, as I already mentioned, but the rest of the movie never truly surpasses it as far as ninja-awesomeness is concerned. We get a few cool moves here and there, but for the most part it's the same kind of fight over and over. The one scene that would have really stood out was the laundromat scene, but most of it is cut out since, well, it's not necessary anyway.

In a movie that really is about action, the action is rather inconsistent. It's not that the fight scenes are too few, or that the fight scenes don't make sense. Here's what I mean. Raizo's first assassination goes horribly bad, though he does succeed. All he has to do is kill this fat mob-type guy, and he's done. Well the fat man beats the hell out of him, a trained ninja. A few moments after the killing, Raizo is on the roof where he's ordered to kill a female ninja who was caught escaping. Raizo turns on his clan and proceeds to kill A LOT of ninjas before being thrown off the roof and almost killed. So he can't kill a fat man with ease, but he can kill full-fledged ninjas. Oh, and he had the element of surprise on both accounts, so that can't be argued. You could also argue that he knows the ninjas fighting style, so he'd know what to expect. Bull. The fat man was a brawler at best. Ninjas are better than that. Or should be, at least. And I've already mentioned the ninjas that can take down fully armed soldiers but can't kill a scared woman with a pistol, and the ninjas getting owned by cars, so I won't get into that. Oh, and they can't hear helicopters or hummers in their valley fortress, either.

The final showdown between Raizo and Ozunu is pretty cool with its stylized set and choreography complementing each other very well, but some of the fight's coolness is lost in the desire to repeatedly get a sweet shot of them facing off. Example: there's a shot of them facing off, Raizo on the left, Ozunu on the right. They clash swords in a variety of shots, and suddenly Ozunu disappears plain from sight, and reappears behind Raizo. Then it cuts back to virtually the same shot of them facing off before, Raizo on the left, Ozunu on the right. Epic faceoffs are cool and all, but it's overused here and disrupts the fun of the action.

I know this comes across as nit-picky, but in a movie like this the action should carry the movie. It does for the most part, despite quite a few stumbling areas that viewers might be able to ignore for the sake of the action.

Where the movie truly does shine is the training scenes. Easily the most interesting part of the movie, we get to see kids training and growing up to be badass ninjas destined to flip out all over the place. Ninja movie legend Sho Kosugi is fantastically ruthless as Ozunu, whipping and smacking his students (he refers to them as his children) into heartless killing machines. If I could get a cut of the movie with just the training scenes and a couple of the fights, I'd be happy. These scenes alone are enough for me to call this movie entertaining.

I'm not even going to get into the acting. Basically Sho Kosugi is the only one who does well. Yeah you could complain about the fact that no one speaks Japanese or German, but eh, it didn't bother me. Kosugi came across way more sinister with his forced, broken English somehow. Maybe I'm just weird.

So that's about it. Not good, but not wholly bad, either. It's just....adequate, which is slightly disappointing to me. I'd see it again, but in all likelihood it'd hurt my opinion of it even more.